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New wave of beers bring the funk

By Christine SismondoSpecial to the Star

Tues., June 19, 2018

The Toronto beer scene has gone sour.

At Rorschach Brewery in Toronto’s east end, patrons drink up the Collective Unconscious, a beer that tastes like sour stone fruit. To the west, thirsty Bloordale residents pop into Burdock Brewery’s bottle shop for some tart Brett Apricot to enjoy at home. Meanwhile, Jelly King, a sour with a white grapefruit twang made at Bellwoods Brewery on Ossington Ave., is practically ubiquitous at Toronto’s better beer bars.

Stephen Beaumont, author of Will Travel For Beer, says we’re seeing a lot more sour beers because of the relatively new method of kettle souring. (Bernard Weil / Toronto Star)

Burlington’s Nickel Brook Brewing Co. saw this trend coming a couple of years ago, when it converted to an all-sour facility called the Funk Lab.

Now that the sour craze has really hit, the family run craft brewer is ready to supply the demand with a flagship sour lineup of four options and a monthly special experimental release.

Not long ago, sour beer lovers had to content themselves with occasional releases of Belgium Lambic at the LCBO or on tap at serious beer bars, such as Bar Volo. Those didn’t come often and they didn’t come cheap. There wasn’t a huge market. Hoppy IPAs had captured the North American beer drinkers’ imagination and people with a more acidic palate, who craved the refreshing, light-bodied, mildly-fruity flavours of a sour were out of luck.

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What changed? Well, we now have home-grown options, largely thanks to “kettle-souring” a new method that adds extra yeast for fermentation to make the sour beer — new here, at least.

“The reason you’re seeing a lot of new beers in this style is that kettle-souring is relatively new in modern terms,” says Stephen Beaumont, author of Will Travel For Beer. He adds that “beer historian Ron Pattison has traced the technique back to early twentieth-century German brewers who used yogurt to get this extra fermentation.”

It was called “yoghurtbier” and, just like the kettle-souring process, it was a method for introducing bacteria into a beer batch that made it taste … well, sour. That’s the key to the entire category — sour and tart flavour profiles grow out of an infection. Most modern brewing techniques have been designed to prevent infections, since bacteria in beer is a risky business — it can easily get out of control and spoil a batch. Not so with kettle-souring, however.

“The way you make a kettle sour is you make a mash (of grains), transfer it to the kettle, then pitch a controlled amount of bacteria, usually lactobacillus or brettanomyces yeast and maybe one or two other bugs, and then monitor the pH levels,” Beaumont says. “When the pH drops to a level that the brewer is happy with — in other words, the acidity is there — they turn on the boil which sterilizes the wort.”

Beaumont points out that this gives the brewer full control over the process, which is the polar opposite of the traditional Belgian Lambics and Gueuzes that are the result of wild yeasts and years spent aging in a barrel. Beaumont recently demonstrated the difference at Bar Hop Brewco on Peter St., ordering up an Oude Beersel Lambiek from Belgium and an unaged Clementine Gose from Two Roads in Connecticut. The first is the result of three years in a barrel; the second was produced over a normal brewing cycle — three to six weeks.

The chief difference between the two is complexity, something that derives, largely, from the aging process. The Belgian beer barrels contain bacteria that add funky flavour notes that Beaumont describes as wet hay, horse blankets and even cat pee and manure.

The Clementine Gose is clean, sharp and tangy; the Lambic is round, rich in flavour and had more “barnyardy” notes.

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Although Beaumont prefers the complex Belgian beer, his point isn’t so much about setting up a hierarchy as it is about having more precise terms for what we’re drinking, instead of lumping them all together under the term “sour.” Especially since many of them are actually more tart (sharp acidic) than “sour.”

The choice for the consumer, then, should be clear-cut. Some will want the simple twang of a kettle-sour; others will crave the more esoteric and funky flavour profile of an aged lambic — manure and all. Unfortunately, it gets slightly more complicated, since many brewers, having mastered the kettle-souring process, are tweaking the process, and/or barrel-aging kettle sours. At the Bar Hop tasting, we sampled Duchesse De Bourgogne, a dark, sweet, fruity beer with cola notes. It’s intentionally inoculated with bacteria in a mixed fermentation process and then spends months aging in casks.

Many brewers in North America are doing similar experiments and, as a result, there’s been a veritable explosion of middle-ground sours that exist between the two contrasts. Nickel Brook’s Funk Lab, where Matthew Gibson is the marketing manager, is a good example of this trend. “We brew beer with brettanomyces, as well as lactobacillus and pediococcus bacteria, then sour in both stainless steel tanks and barrels. This differs from a kettle sour, where the sour bacteria is killed off by boiling prior to fermentation. Our process creates a deeper, more complex sourness.”

Nickel Brook has a regular lineup of fruity sours—pineapple, peach and raspberry (the latter, an award-winner) — as well as Duplicitous, a dry-hopped Gose and a monthly special release. Most of its beers are on the light side when it comes to body, alcohol content and sweetness. Its Peach Uber Sour Berlinerweisse, for example, is 3.8 per cent alcohol and would be a refreshing “session” sour that would be excellent company at a picnic lunch.

With all of these new options — and more on the way — sour lovers are finally spoiled for choice.

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